Jens Blechert

University of Salzburg · Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Psychology

The social environment requires people to quickly form contextually appropriate social evaluations. Models of social cognition suggest that this ability depends on the interaction of automatic and controlled evaluative systems. However, controlled processes, such as reappraisal of an initial response, have rarely been studied in the context of soci...

We investigated body-related attentional biases in eating disorders by testing whether individuals with anorexia nervosa (AN, n = 19) and bulimia nervosa (BN, n = 18) differ from healthy controls (HC, n = 21) in their bias for attending to a photo of their own body (self-photo) relative to a photo of a matched control participant's body (other phot...

Current theories and nosology assume that the self-evaluation (SE) of individuals with eating disorders (EDs) is unduly influenced by body shape and weight. However, experimental data supporting this link are scarce, and it is not specified which subdomains of SE might be affected. We studied patients with anorexia nervosa (AN), bulimia nervosa (BN...

The approach-avoidance task (AAT) probes tendencies contributing to unwanted behaviours, like excessive snacking, by measuring RT differences between approach and avoidance responses to different stimuli. It retrains such tendencies using repeated avoidance of appetitive stimuli and approach of healthy alternatives. The most common paradigm, the ir...

While it has become standard practice to report the reliability of self-report scales, it remains uncommon to do the same for experimental paradigms. To facilitate this practice, we review old and new ways to compute reliability in reaction-time tasks, and we compare their accuracy using a simulation study. Highly inaccurate and negatively biased r...

The tendency to approach food faster than to avoid it (i.e., approach bias) is thought to facilitate food intake, particularly foods that conflict with one’s dietary goals. However, this relationship has been difficult to demonstrate, which ties into an ongoing debate about whether such cognitive-behavioral biases represent stable traits or fluctua...

Purpose Emotional eating during negative emotions might underlie disordered eating behavior (i.e., binge eating and food restriction). Positive emotions, by contrast, seem to promote healthier eating behavior. Naturalistic research on the links between emotions and eating across individuals with binge-eating disorder (BED), bulimia nervosa (BN), bi...

Objectives: To study whether a mobile, unguided Cognitive Behavior Therapy-based Intervention for Sleep Disturbance, Sleep2 is feasible, acceptable, and reduces mental health/sleep disturbance symptoms among the Ukrainian population during the ongoing war. Methods: A single-arm, open-label, uncontrolled pre-post evaluation study was conducted with...

Objective: This study investigated the impact of war exposure on post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) and sleep disturbance across Ukraine. Subjective and objective indicators of war exposure were modelled as predictors of these symptoms. Methods: We created two predictors: first, we used governmental and crowd-sourced data to create an objective...

Background Regular physical activity (PA) comes with a multitude of benefits. However, most of them only become apparent after some time, while motivational ‘costs’ (e. g., exertion or fatigue) are immediate. Therefore, PA engagement requires individuals to overcome immediate costs in favor of longer-term benefits. The capacity to achieve that, how...

Food approach bias is a behavioral tendency to approach food stimuli faster than to avoid them and is thought to predispose individuals to food intake. However, relationships between bias measures and intake have proven difficult to demonstrate empirically, possibly because approach bias has typically been treated as a stable characteristic of indi...

Background Maintaining a healthy body weight and reaching long-term dietary goals requires ongoing self-monitoring and behavioral adjustments. How individuals respond to successes and failures is described in models of self-regulation: while cybernetic models propose that failures lead to increased self-regulatory efforts and successes permit a red...

Background Problematic drinking is common among college students and associated with various somatic and mental health problems. Given significant evidence for the efficacy of smartphone-based interventions and the frequent use of smartphones among college students, it can be assumed that such interventions have great potential to facilitate access...

BACKGROUND There has been a surge in the development of applications that aim to improve health, physical activity (PA), and well-being through behavior change. These apps often focus on creating a long-term and sustainable impact on the user. Just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs) based on passive sensing of the current user context (e.g., f...

Objectives: A healthy diet is essential for preventing chronic disease and promoting overall health. Translating one's intention to eat healthy into actual behaviour has, however, proven difficult with a range of internal and contextual factors identified as driving eating behaviour. Design: We leverage Temporal Self-Regulation Theory to examine...

Purpose Emotional eating (EE) refers to eating in response to (negative) emotions. Evidence for the validity of EE is mixed: some meta-analyses find EE only in eating disordered patients, others only in restrained eaters, which suggest that only certain subgroups show EE. Furthermore, EE measures from lab-based assessments, ecological momentary ass...

A healthy diet is essential for preventing chronic disease and promoting overall health. Translating one's intention to eat healthy into actual behavior has, however, proven difficult with a range of internal and contextual factors identified as driving eating behavior. We leverage Temporal Self-Regulation Theory to examine these momentary determin...

Measurement and modification of food craving has gained relevance in the current obesity epidemic. The Craving Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) considers not only craving intensity but also cognitive intrusiveness and imagery vividness as craving facets and could thus add to the assessment of food craving. It is available in two versions with ten ite...

The approach-avoidance task (AAT) has been used to help individuals avoid unhealthy foods, but results are mixed and often underwhelming. The current study explores the psychometric properties and approach-avoidance bias modifying capability of the dual-feature AAT, a novel AAT variant developed to modify approach-avoidance biases while concealing...

Objective Food‐cue‐reactivity entails neural and experiential responses to the sight and smell of attractive foods. Negative emotions can modulate such cue‐reactivity and this might be central to the balance between restrictive versus bulimic symptomatology in Anorexia Nervosa (AN) and Bulimia Nervosa (BN). Method Pleasantness ratings and electroc...

Stress frequently influences a person's propensity to drink alcohol. Inter-individual differences in such stress-related drinking can be assessed through psychometric scales; however, available questionnaires conflate stress- with emotion-related reasons to drink and ignore evidence of decreased alcohol consumption in response to stress. Therefore,...

Background Food craving relates to unhealthy eating behaviors such as overeating or binge eating and is thus a promising target for digital interventions. Yet, craving varies strongly across the day and is more likely in some contexts (external, internal) than in others. Prediction of food cravings ahead of time would enable preventive intervention...

Purpose: Emotional eating (EE) refers to eating in response to (negative) emotions. Evidence for the validity of EE is mixed: some meta-analyses find EE only in eating disordered patients, others only in restrained eaters, which suggest that only certain subgroups show EE. Furthermore, EE measures from lab-based assessments, ecological momentary as...

Reaction time (RT) data are often pre-processed before analysis by rejecting outliers and errors and aggregating the data. In stimulus–response compatibility paradigms such as the approach–avoidance task (AAT), researchers often decide how to pre-process the data without an empirical basis, leading to the use of methods that may harm data quality....

Background Valence and motivational direction are linked. We approach good things and avoid bad things, and experience overriding these links as conflicting. Positive valence is more consistently linked with approach than negative valence is linked with avoidance. Therefore, avoiding positive stimuli should produce greater behavioral and neural sig...

Introduction Unhealthy eating behaviour is a major contributor to obesity and related diseases and is associated with a behavioural bias to approach rather than avoid desired foods, as measured with reaction time tasks. Approach-avoidance interventions (AAIs) have been proposed as a way to modify food evaluations and help people to eat in accordanc...

Objective: Current health behavior models of physical activity (PA) suggest that not all PA intentions are translated into actual PA behavior, resulting in a significant intention-behavior gap (IBG) of almost 50%. These models further suggest that higher self-efficacy and specific planning can aid in decreasing this gap. However, as most evidence...

Background. Food choice is at the core of several eating-related pathologies and has high relevance for body weight. The aim of this study was to compare individuals with the eating disorders anorexia nervosa (AN), bulimia nervosa (BN) and binge-eating disorder (BED) and the weight disorders overweight (HC-OW) and obesity (HC-OB) to healthy control...

Stress frequently influences a person’s propensity to drink alcohol. Inter-individual differences in such stress-related drinking can be assessed through psychometric scales; however, available questionnaires conflate stress- with emotion-related reasons to drink and ignore evidence of decreased alcohol consumption in response to stress. Therefore,...

Introduction. Emotional eating might underlie disordered eating behavior as suggested by the affect regulation model in binge-type eating disorders (EDs; binge-eating in response to negative emotions) and the emotion avoidance model in restrictive-type EDs (food restriction to avoide negative emotions). Positive affect by contrast seems to promote...

Background and objectives Individuals are thought to be biased towards approaching positive stimuli and avoiding negative stimuli. Yet, it is unclear whether this general pattern applies to all stimulus classes or whether biases are more specific. We expected significant approach biases towards two types of positive stimuli, appetitive foods and bu...

Background: Food craving precedes unhealthy eating behaviors such as overeating or binge eating and is thus a promising intervention target. Yet, craving varies rapidly across the day and responds to external and internal context changes. This makes it a candidate for just in time adaptive interventions (JITAI), which, however, requires that it can...

Training motor responses to food images can influence subsequent evaluations of the food and even consumption. One important question in the literature is whether training people to approach versus avoid food items is different from training people to respond (‘go’) versus not responding (‘no go’) to food items. Therefore, we systematically investi...

Background: Chocolate is one of the most frequently craved foods, and it often challenges self-regulation. These cravings may be underpinned by a neural facilitation of approach behavior toward chocolate. This preregistered study investigated the behavioral and neural correlates of such a bias using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and...

While it has become standard practice for researchers to report the reliability of their self-report scales, it remains uncommon to do the same for experimental paradigms. To facilitate this practice, we reviewed and statistically examined old and new ways to compute the reliability of reaction time (RT) tasks. Using simulated data, we revealed tha...

Objective: Food cue reactivity entails neural and experiential responses to the sight of attractive foods. Negative emotions can modulate such cue reactivity and this might be central to the balance between restrictive versus bulimic symptomatology in Anorexia Nervosa (AN) and Bulimia Nervosa (BN). Method: Pleasantness ratings and electrocortical r...

Objective Current health behavior models of physical activity (PA) suggest that intentions, but also self- efficacy and planning play a key role in successful PA enactment. However, data on how these determinants are related within individuals across time (state level) are scarce as most evidence stems from between-person (trait level) research. Ex...

Introduction: Unhealthy eating behavior is a major contributor to obesity and related diseases and may be driven by automatic approach tendencies towards tasty but unhealthy foods. Approach-Avoidance interventions (AAI) have been proposed as a remedy to retrain approach biases and help people to eat in line with their dietary goals. Mobile implemen...

Reaction time (RT) data are often pre-processed before analysis by rejecting outliers and errors and aggregating the data. In stimulus-response compatibility paradigms such as the Approach-Avoidance Task (AAT), researchers often decide how to pre-process the data without an empirical basis, leading to the use of methods that may hurt rather than he...

BACKGROUND Prevention of binge eating through just-in-time mobile interventions requires prediction of high-risk times, e.g., by using affective states and associated contextual factors. Yet, these factors and states are highly idiosyncratic, and thus prediction models that are based on averages across individuals often fail. OBJECTIVE We thus dev...

Background: Prevention of binge eating through just-in-time mobile interventions requires the prediction of respective high-risk times, for example, through preceding affective states or associated contexts. However, these factors and states are highly idiographic; thus, prediction models based on averages across individuals often fail. Objective...

Background Eating plays an important role in mental and physical health and is influenced by affective (e.g., emotions, stress) and appetitive (i.e., food craving, hunger) states, among others. Yet, substantial temporal variability and marked individual differences in these relationships have been reported. Exploratory data analytical approaches th...

Consistently not responding to stimuli during go/no-go training leads to lower evaluations of these NoGo stimuli. How this NoGo-devaluation-effect can be explained has remained unclear. Here, we ran three experiments to test the hypothesis that people form stimulus-stop-associations during the training, which predict the strength of the devaluation...

Training motor responses to food images can influence subsequent evaluations of the food and even consumption. One important question in the literature is whether training people to approach versus avoid food items is different from training people to respond (‘go’) versus not responding (‘no go’) to food items. Therefore, we systematically investi...

Purpose Eating disorders (ED) and social anxiety disorder are highly comorbid with potentially shared symptoms like social appearance anxiety (SAA) referring to a fear of being negatively evaluated by others’ because of overall appearance. SAA constitutes a risk factor for eating psychopathology and bridges between EDs and social anxiety disorder....

Objective: Theories on emotional eating are central to our understanding of etiology, maintenance, and treatment of binge eating. Yet, findings on eating changes under induced negative emotions in binge-eating disorder (BED) are equivocal. Thus, we studied whether food-cue reactivity is potentiated under negative emotions in BED, which would point...

Binge Eating Disorder (BED) has been associated with deficits in cognitive control and decision-making. Yet, no study has yet investigated the characteristics of food choice and the involved choice conflict in this disorder. In the present study individuals with BED (N = 22) and without BED (N = 61), with a body mass index (BMI) between 21 and 44 c...

It is often assumed that emotional eating occurs when an individual is unable to utilise emotion regulation (ER) to cope with stress. In this stress exposure study, we explored whether manipulating participants’ ER strategies (rumination or self-compassion) influenced their stress-related affect and food consumption. Fifty-three adolescents ( M age...

Background Studies on food cue reactivity have documented that altered responses to high-calorie food are associated with bulimic symptomatology, however, alterations in sexual motivations and behaviors are also associated clinical features in this population, which justify their inclusion as a research target. Here, we study responses to erotic cu...

Approach biases to foods may explain why food consumption often diverges from deliberate dietary intentions. Yet, the assessment of behavioural biases with the approach-avoidance tasks (AAT) is often unreliable and validity is partially unclear. The present study continues a series of studies that develop a task based on naturalistic approach and a...

Food craving (FC) peaks are highly context-dependent and variable. Accurate prediction of FC might help preventing disadvantageous eating behavior. Here, we examine whether data from two weeks of Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) questionnaires on stress and emotions (active EMA, aEMA) alongside temporal features and smartphone sensor data (pas...

The recently developed Salzburg Stress Eating Scale (SSES) is the first to specifically address the relationship of stress experiences and coping failure on the one hand and increases or decreases in food intake on the other hand. The SSES demonstrated good psychometric properties in English and German speaking adult samples. However, it has not be...

Background: Studies on food cue reactivity have documented that altered responses to high-calorie food are associated with bulimic symptomatology, however, alterations in sexual motivations and behaviors are also associated clinical features for this population, which justify their inclusion as a research target. Here, we study responses to erotic...

Approach biases to foods may explain why food consumption often diverges from deliberate dietary intentions. Yet, the assessment of behavioural biases with the approach-avoidance tasks (AAT) is often unreliable and validity is partially unclear. The present study continues a series of studies that develop a task based on naturalistic approach and a...

Background and objectives Previous studies have shown that humans, particularly those with high levels of spider fear, show automatic avoidance of spiders. However, most tasks used in these studies employ symbolic approach-avoidance movements instead of naturalistic movements. Methods The current study employed a touchscreen-based approach-avoidan...

Objective Emotion regulation difficulties in anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN) might underlie bingeing and purging in BN, extreme fasting in AN, or combinations of these symptoms in binge-purge type AN. In this study, we tested for decreased food cue reactivity in response to negative emotions in AN, and the opposite pattern for BN. Fu...

In our world with nearly omnipresent availability of attractive and palatable high-calorie food, the struggle against overweight and obesity is a major individual and public health challenge. Preference for unhealthy food and eating-related habits have a strong influence on health, suggesting that high-calorie food triggers fast and near-automatic...

Behavioral tendencies in the Approach-Avoidance Task (AAT) have mostly been assessed using a joystick as a response device. In recent years, other hardware devices such as tablets, smartphones, and computer mice have also been used. However, it remains unclear whether different response devices yield similar results and show comparable psychometric...

Binge eating disorder and bulimia nervosa are eating disorders that are characterized by recurrent binge eating episodes. The highly contextualized nature of binge eating makes naturalistic research a particularly suitable means of understanding the context within which binge eating occurs. The present study aimed to characterise binge eating days...

Approach biases to foods may explain why food consumption often diverges from deliberate dietary intentions. When cognitive resources are depleted, implicit responses may contribute to overeating and overweight. Yet, the assessment of behavioural biases with the approach-avoidance tasks (AAT) is often unreliable. We previously addressed methodologi...

Objective: Different subtypes of eating disorders (ED) show dysfunctional eating behaviors such as overeating and/or restriction in response to emotions. Yet, systematic comparisons of all major EDs on emotional eating patterns are lacking. Furthermore, emotional eating correlates with body mass index (BMI), which also differs between EDs and thus...

Strong cravings for unhealthy foods and implicit tendencies to approach and consume them constitute threats to physical and mental health in vulnerable populations. Yet, implicit measures of such food approach tendencies have methodological limitations, as existing approach-avoidance tasks (AAT) are often unreliable, require specialized hardware, a...

Introduction: Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) quickly evolved into a global pandemic in early 2020, and most countries enforced social confinements to reduce transmission. This seems to dovetail with increasing, potentially problematic, screen use habits, such as gaming and “binge-watching.” Yet, the subjective experience of the common confinements may...

Background Negative mood often triggers binge eating in bulimia nervosa (BN). We investigated motivational salience as a possible underlying mechanism using event-related potentials (ERPs) as indicators of motivated attention allocation (P300) and sustained processing (LPP). Methods We collected ERPs (P300: 350–400 ms; LPP: 600–1000 ms) from 21 wo...

Background Many people aim to eat healthily. Yet, affluent food environments encourage consumption of energy dense and nutrient-poor foods, making it difficult to accomplish individual goals such as maintaining a healthy diet and weight. Moreover, goal-congruent eating might be influenced by affects, stress and intense food cravings and might also...

Background: Many people aim to eat healthily. Yet, affluent food environments encourage consumption of energy dense and nutrient-poor foods, making it difficult to accomplish individual goals such as maintaining a healthy diet and weight. Moreover, goal-congruent eating might be influenced by affects, stress and intense food cravings and might also...

Maladaptive avoidance behaviour, a key symptom of anxiety-related disorders, prevents extinction learning and maintains anxiety. Individual personality traits likely influence avoidance propensity: high sensation-seeking may decrease avoidance, thereby increasing extinction, and neuroticism may have the reverse effect. However, research on this is...

Background and Objectives Addictive behaviors are gaining recognition in the clinical community, leading to more attention for the effects of problematic porn use. As many addictive behaviors are characterized by automatically activated approach-tendencies for disorder-relevant stimuli, we tested whether such tendencies are also present for erotic...